WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
28d ago
The wife finally caved and gave me her blessing to just remake the cabinet doors for our kitchen, after our attempts to strip and refinish them failed horribly.
Picked up about $100 in rough hard maple at my local lumber yard, and began the process of marking out my pieces on the planks, breaking it down, milling it, etc. It's the first major job I've put through the jointer I got back in December, and it's easily proving itself worth the money.
See, before I was putting the parts of my project on a planing sled to get one side flat, with hot glue and shims to support the wobbly workpiece and keep it in place. It took forever. Then I'd clamp it down to another sled for my tablesaw and rip off one edge pretty damned straight. This worked but was slow, and involved a lot of extra steps. It also discouraged me from re-flattening a workpiece if it cupped a little after sitting in my detached garage for a week or month.
But man, now that I have a proper 10" benchtop jointer, it's so damned fast! I ended up with 40+ individual pieces for the 9 cabinet doors I need to make, and I just zipped them across the jointer, gave them a few passes through the planer, and I'm good to go. Was relatively frustration free, and extremely straight forward versus testing and retesting the wobble of a board and shimming it on a sled. Probably would have taken me all damned week or more to get through all the pieces the old way.
Side note, someone once asked me if all these tools were "worth it". You know, beyond the enjoyment of having a hobby, or making beautiful things yourself that you can appreciate every day. And that's a hard question to answer when you are making weird custom items. I mean, any sort of custom carpentry is going to cost you, but you rarely compare what you've made against that. You compare it against a retail item, possibly of inferior quality, or maybe some etsy or ebay piece, though that can be all over the place too. Anyways, cabinetry gives me an answer.
The same nine doors I'm making for $100 in material would have cost about $600 at Home Depot or Lowes. They are $60+ apiece. Even including the router bits I bought to do the raised panel, stile, rails and edge profile, and the jig I bought to make the proper holes for the mounting hardware ($300 total), I'm coming out decently ahead. And they will almost certainly get used again. I've had plans for a curio cabinet for miniatures, and probably redoing the top cabinets in our kitchen as well.
The kitchen has been half taken apart for going on 2 months now, while the wife waffled back and forth, and struggled with a lack of motivation. I'm hoping to get the new doors finished and back on in 2 weeks? Probably need this week to finish manufacturing the pieces and assembling them. Then another week to finish them? We'll see, fingers crossed.
There is always El Salvador?
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